More Santa Fe

 

Our week in Santa Fe has ended and we haven’t finished telling about it!  So we’ll just do a “wrap-up” since we leave on Friday. Santa Fe is a very interesting place, and it’s been a good week.                               

Santa Fe Skies RV Park:  This is a great RV park on top of a hill with fantastic views in all directions.  Our site has a large patio with a lovely garden beside it.  

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Shidoni Foundry:  Located near Santa Fe in Tesuque, NM, Shidoni  Bronze Casting Foundry pours bronze every Saturday to make bronze statues.  This Saturday they didn’t pour, but we still had a very interesting tour of the factory with explanations from an employee who also creates his own bronze works.  We also enjoyed seeing the gallery and gardens filled with statues and went to a glass blowing shop nearby. Afterwards, we ate lunch at Tesuque Village Market and enjoyed more delicious New Mexico cuisine – Tomatillo Shrimp Enchiladas and BBQ brisket.

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Downtown Santa Fe:  Our first day in Santa Fe George and Jan introduced us to Cafe Sena, a lovely restaurant in a garden, cool even when it was in the 80’s, and the food, of course, was delicious.  After lunch we walked around seeing the sights, including the Indian Market at the Palace of the Governors. The next day we bicycled along the Santa Fe River, part of the way on a bike trail, and went to the annual Traditional and Contemporary Spanish Market.

 

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Santa Fe Plaza:  In the evenings four days a week during the summer tourist season, music performances are held on the plaza – free to all .  It’s a gathering place for all types of people – and their dogs.  We enjoyed “people watching,” eating fajitas, seeing the balloon man’s creations, the music, and watching people dance to the Texas two-step band.  It was  great evening to end our stay in Santa Fe.

 

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Train Day in Santa Fe

 

Santa Fe Skies RV Park, where we’re staying, is located only about a half mile from the Rail Runner commuter train that runs between  Albuquerque and Santa Fe. We rode the Rail Runner into Santa Fe, about a fifteen minute trip. It takes about an hour between ABQ and Santa Fe. It appears to be fairly new. The roadbed is very smooth with  welded rail and the equipment, made by Bombardier in Canada, has three levels and is very comfortable. The train appears to servegovernment workers commuting between the capitol in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and was the idea of Governor Bill Richardson. The schedule accommodates commuters between the two cities, but the run times are not frequent enough during the day to be convenient to tourists visiting Santa Fe.

From the depot in Santa Fe we got the Santa Fe Southern tourist train for a one hour trip south to an overlook of an ancestral Pueblo area that may be developed into a national monument. The train runs on the old Santa Fe spur connecting Lamy, NM, with Santa Fe. The Santa  Fe main line was at Lamy, and Amtrak currently runs through there. We left Santa Fe in a down pouring thunder storm. We rode in 1920’s era heavy-weight cars with windows that open. There was also an open flat car, but we could only use it for a short time due to rain.  On the return trip, the train went backwards, so the brakeman in the caboose looked ahead and blew the whistle for crossings and was the “eyes” of the train.

A Full Day in Santa Fe

 

On Tues. Jan, George, and I went to the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market and enjoyed seeing (and buying) fresh produce.   There were also flowers, bread, and some gift items.  It’s a very nice market and all the produce is grown by the vendors in the Santa Fe area.  There were lots of beans, fingerling potatoes, cukes, squash, some corn, big onions, etc., but no tomatoes. 

Then all of us went to lunch at Guadalupe Cafe which was fabulous.  I loved the Guacamole Chicken Enchilada, and George enjoyed his South Western Salad.  We walked down the street to see St. Miquel’s Church which was built in 1610 and also the Oldest House in Santa Fe.

We visited Canyon Road, an area of upscale galleries and saw some outstanding bronze statues, lovely flowers, and very attractive adobe buildings.  Our final destination for the day was the Georgia O’Keefe Gallery which was featuring O’Keefe’s abstract paintings.  We ended our day with George and George grilling steaks for dinner – a great ending to a great day.

Bandelier National Monument

 

On Monday we drove NW from Santa Fe to Bandelier National  Monument to see the ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings. We drove  about  fifty miles and climbed gradually eventually reaching nearly 8,000 ft .  The ancestral Pueblo people lived in a canyon at Bandelier about 700 years ago. The entire area is hundreds of feet deep in soft volcanic ash rock from a nearby extinct volcano. The people carved the volcanic rock into bricks to make buildings   that they attached to the canyon wall where there is a cave. We saw the foundations of the buildings and went in some of the rock caves, enjoying the cool day in spite of showers.  It is an amazing place, and we enjoyed seeing it and hearing about it from the rangers there.

Our plan was to visit the Bradbury Science Museum in nearby Los Alamos after visiting  Bandelier. As we were approaching Bandelier we began to see signs for “tech areas.” It soon became apparent that these areas with  buildings were part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. On one ridge we saw a moderately sized radio telescope antenna that was pointed straight up at the sky. The tech areas were surrounded by barbed wire fences and each had a number.

We had thought that at Los Alamos we would learn all about the building of the first atomic bomb. There was that at the Bradbury Museum, but the big surprise was the vastness of the National Laboratory there and in the surrounding 40 square miles that was originally established to build the  first atomic bomb during WW II. We learned that there is a total of 49 tech areas where various scientific experiments are taking place. We had the feeling that there is no telling what kind of experiments are going on there. When we reached the outskirts of Los Alamos we had to pass through a government guard station.

We learned that one of the main missions of the laboratory is to check nuclear weapons for readiness and reliability without actually testing them. Los Alamos is one facility that still builds nuclear weapons. In addition to defense, the laboratory is working in diverse areas like medicine and the human genome, environmental research, and energy.

Albuquerque – Our Western Destination

                                                                                                        We arrived in Albuquerque to be greeted by a heat wave with high’s in the low 100’s.  On Saturday we checked out Old Town, ate lunch at a good Mexican restaurant, and went to  the Rio Grande Botanic Gardens.  The gardens are lovely and consist of several sections:  roses, desert area, Mediterranean area, Japanese garden, etc.  It even has a model railroad which is Garden gauge and laid out with towns, rivers, and trestles.

One of the places we visited was the Museum of Nuclear Science and History.   It had displays about Marie Curie and other early nuclear scientists, the Manhattan Project, nuclear medicine, and many other subjects.   

We also enjoyed a visit to the Rio  Grande Zoo which is an excellent zoo and has  lots of cottonwoods and grassy areas throughout the zoo, i.e. shade!  I especially enjoyed seeing and photographing the giraffes.  The elephant population includes a mother and daughter, Daizy and Rozy, both born at the zoo.

Palo Duro Canyon

 

We drove through Texas ranching country alongside many fields of corn and hay to reach an outstanding Texas State Park, Palo Duro Canyon.   It was apparent on arriving at the park office that the CCC had been involved with building this park.  One of their most impressive structures is now used as the visitor’s center and has “picture windows” with fantastic views of the canyon, including Lighthouse Rock, the symbol of the park.

From the office, we drove down a 10% grade to the bottom of the  canyon to reach Sagebrush Campground, the closest campground to the entrance.  The other CG with 50 amp service is reached by driving through 5 washes – areas where rainwater flows over the road.  The entire canyon area is verdant due to the recent rain.

We drove through the park today stopping to take photos – too many photos – but it was hard to resist  taking  “just another shot” with the beauty of the canyon walls with rocks of many colors. 

Another feature of the park is the herd of Texas Longhorns which graze just inside the entrance.  Several Texas state parks are home to Longhorns  in an attempt to preserve the breed, a part of the Texas legacy.  Incidentally, other wildlife we saw included a roadrunner and what appeared to be a tarantula.

Now for the weather report:  Note the temperature on the thermometer which was at the entrance to a trail. (It reads 110).  Another thermometer was on the overlook near the visitor’s center and registered 10 degrees cooler. 

Heading West . . . Summer 2010

 

We left home Sunday, July 11, heading west to New Mexico where we’ll join our  friends George and Jan in Santa Fe and Taos, and then continue on to Colorado.  The first few days we are mainly  driving, but we stopped Mon. just across the Mississippi River in Lake Village, Arkansas, at Rhoda’s Hot Tamales to sample the tamales.  As it turned out, we also got a take out order for dinner as well:  fried chicken, turnip greens, mac and cheese, sweet potatoes, and corn bread. 

George read about Rhoda’s in an RV park review, and the comment was “if you can get past the appearance, the food’s great,” so we decided to try it since it was on our route.  And it was quite a find! 

 

 

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